My family and I left Africa for good on my sixteenth birthday. I turned one somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on our way to Africa, so there was some poetry in our departure, but it was hard on all of us. We all thought we were going to be in Africa for…
It has been my practice over the last several years to sort of disappear from these pages after Lent. My absence has never been intentional, but it has been consistent. As the reality of our unfortunate isolation became more apparent, I decided several week ago that I would keep writing every night on beyond Easter,…
A Holy Saturday Christian. I learned the term from Wil Gafney, an Episcopal priest and Hebrew Bible Scholar who teaches at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth. In a “pastoral letter” she wrote to her students after they had dealt with particularly violent biblical texts she said, I am a Holy Saturday preacher. I wake…
photograph one of the photographs of Jesus I keep in the wallet of my mind is of him looking out over Jerusalem. the sun is burning the last bits of Judean blue out of the Palestinian sky, making room for the night. the long reaches of the last light catch the tears running down his…
Order an entree from an Italian restaurant in New England and it will come with a side of pasta. I don’t mean the entree will be served over pasta. That’s a pasta dish. I mean any entree comes with a side of pasta. Night before last, we ordered from Centro Pizza, one of our regular…
The subtitle to David Whyte’s book Consolations gives me a smile most every morning as I turn to my word for the day: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, because the words are anything but everyday it seems to me. (I have to say, parenthetically, that as great as his writing is,…
Spring never comes soon enough in New England or, perhaps I should say, it takes a long time to get here. It teases us in early April, as it did for the last two or three beautiful, crisp, sunlit days, but then come mornings like the one we woke up to that are cold and…
One of the most magnificent failures of my life was as a church planter in Boston. Ginger and I moved to Charlestown, Massachusetts a few months after we married to try and start a church there. We worked hard at it and we had no idea what we were doing. Two or three years in,…
We mark the days of Holy Week as though Jesus was on a schedule that culminated in his execution on Good Friday. We give ourselves one or two things to think about each day and then move on to the next. John wrote that if he had written down everything that happened in Jesus’ life…
Some of my cookies can be made on demand. These take some time. These cookies came about as we began exploring new flavors to add to our repertoire. Early on in the Milton’s Famous days, we began to say we wanted our cookies to tell a story: there was a beginning taste, a middle, and…